Pope Francis has authorised the promulgation of the decree for the beatification of the priest from Bạc Liêu killed in hatred of the faith in 1946, during the First Indochina War. He offered his life to save his community; his grave is venerated even by non-Christians. The news was reported on the very day the Vietnamese Church celebrates the feast of the martyrs of previous centuries.

In today's Ordinary Public Consistory fixed for World Missions Sunday the ceremony during which the Franciscans and laymen killed in Syria in 1860 and the founder of the Consolata missionaries, priests and nuns also present today in South Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Taiwan will be proclaimed saints in Rome.

Donor countries meet to discuss Syria, but the country's ‘forgotten war’ continues to provoke suffering and the flight of its population (about 500 a day). Speaking to AsiaNews, the apostolic nuncio in Damascus describes a ‘stagnant political process’ while ‘the only progress is in terms of poverty’. The exodus of Christians ‘another great wound that bleeds’.